My most recent books are the Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010), The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). I consult with organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative. At the World Bank, I held many management positions, including director of knowledge management (1996-2000). I am currently a director of the Scrum Alliance, an Amazon Affiliate and a fellow of the Lean Software Society. You can follow me on Twitter at @stevedenning. My website is at www.stevedenning.com.

What Maslow Missed

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of the most popular models in leadership writing. Developed in 1948, the hierarchy of needs is pervasive across many disciplines, including business, management, marketing, parenting technology, education and psychology.

Simple, orderly, intuitively sensible, cognitively appealing and offering order out of chaos, the hierarchy of needs has only one problem: it is plain, flat, dead wrong.

A fascinating article by Pamela Rutledge in Psychology Today entitled “Social Networks: What Maslow Misses” (November 2011) points out that Maslow’s model misses the role of social connection.

Maslow’s model, as its name suggests, organizes groups of human needs into levels in a hierarchical structure, forming a pyramid. It’s similar in some senses to video games in that you have to fulfill the requirements of one set of needs before you can get to the next level up.

Maslow’s model is hierarchical. The human brain at the base is driven by a basic instinct to survive with food drink and shelter. The second level is made up of the safety needs. The third level in Maslow’s model comprises the social needs like family, affection, relationships, work groups, and community. The fourth level comprises the ego-centric needs of achievement, responsibility, and reputation. And finally, at the top is self-actualization, personal growth and fulfillment.

In reviews of research based on Maslow’s theory, little evidence has been found for the ranking of needs that Maslow described, or even for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all.

“Here’s the problem with Maslow’s hierarchy,” explains Rutledge. “None of these needs — starting with basic survival on up — are possible without social connection and collaboration…. Without collaboration, there is no survival. It was not possible to defeat a Woolley Mammoth, build a secure structure, or care for children while hunting without a team effort. It’s more true now than then. Our reliance on each other grows as societies became more complex, interconnected, and specialized. Connection is a prerequisite for survival, physically and emotionally.”

“Needs are not hierarchical. Life is messier than that. Needs are, like most other things in nature, an interactive, dynamic system, but they are anchored in our ability to make social connections. Maslow’s model needs rewiring so it matches our brains. Belongingness is the driving force of human behavior, not a third tier activity. The system of human needs from bottom to top, shelter, safety, sex, leadership, community, competence and trust, are dependent on our ability to connect with others. Belonging to a community provides the sense of security and agency that makes our brains happy and helps keep us safe.”

In some ways, life hasn’t changed our fundamental human natures. Whether it’s the ancient Savannah or today’s Facebook and Twitter, social behaviors adapt to the environment to support that most basic of human needs. Social connection is ever-present.

What social media has done is make it infinitely easier for the social connection to take place. And today’s young people entering the workplace, who have grown up in this inter-connected world, expect the workplace to reflect that. .

Implications for management

In 20th Century management, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was helpful to a certain extent in pointing out to managers why traditional managment–hierarchical bureaucracy with managers acting as controllers of individuals—was unlikely to meet the psychological needs of employees. But it offered an unrealistic route to meeting those needs: ascension up the hierarchy of needs towards self-actualization. The truth is that not everyone wants or needs or is able to be a self-actualizing artist or leader.

In reality, Rutledge’s rewired version of psychological needs suggests a more realistic set of multiple paths, through social connection, to meet our varying psychology needs. What it implies, and the experience of radical management confirms, is that getting work done by people working together in self-organizing teams can meet most people’s psychological needs without positing unrealistic goals of self-actualization as the be-all and end-all of life.

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I am a Maslovian scholar — a former business exec completing his PhD dissertation on Maslow. Please consider some corrections and alternative perspective. (I realize you are riffing on a Psychology Today web piece written by another author.)

First, Maslow introduced his hierarchy of needs in 1943, not 1948. Second, the needs hierarchy was from the start — and remained — a theory of *individual motivation*, not personality theory, not social psychology. If these distinctions seem subtle, they are meaningful. Data processing is not information systems nor information technology. To the casual observer (careless with small differences that make a big difference), seemingly similar or like-sounding terms “are all the same.” Of course, they are not.

Regarding the Pyramid of Needs: Maslow NEVER organized his hierarchy of needs into a pyramid. That familiar iconic depiction, which you or your Forbes publisher yet again perpetuates here, is a convention of textbook publishers. I have collected some million words published by Maslow in journals and books. I have reviewed thousands of his personal papers, correspondence, and files.

Not a single one of his authored pieces includes a pyramid. Not one.

Maslow described his hierarchy of needs as a *dynamic*, much more like the second graphic in your piece than the first (cliched, and incorrect) version which pictures the human needs as separate, distinct, and ordered sequentially. That is NOT how Maslow described them. Not from 1943 on.

Maslow’s description of human needs, as you interestingly report, includes the fundamental need to belong. Social interaction and influence is quite primary. It was not “missed” by Maslow. In fact, Maslow frequently both wrote about and lectured about the importance of social interaction in influencing the individual.

Maslow credited the *anthropologist* Ruth Benedict as one of his most influential teachers. He met her at the New School in New York City where he took classes after he earned his PhD at Wisconsin.

In fact, Maslow credits anthropologist Benedict as one of two people who inspired the very idea of self-actualization (the other was *Gestalt* psychologist Max Wertheimer).

Maslow also credits Benedict for encouraging him to head into the woods of the Canadian Pacific Coast to live among the Blackfoot Indians as an anthropological field project in the 1930s.

That experience heavily influenced Maslow’s view of the important influence of society on the individual. And it heavily influenced his views of WORKPLACE cooperation. Maslow wrote about this in his book “Eupsychian Management Journal,” which was later republished as “Maslow on Management” (still in print).

You grossly mischaracterize 1) self-actualization, 2) Maslow’s view of management, and 3) his view of workplace motivation — all in one sentence!

Self-actualization is not about “becoming an artist” but fulfilling one’s uniquely individual potentialities, whatever they may be. Maslow’s view of the workplace was to create an environment where the needs of the individual were *naturally* fulfilled by aligning with those of the organization, and society generally.

I could go on (and on). But I trust you get the idea. Maslow most certainly did not miss the import of social interaction and support for the individual, or vice versa. The same, however, cannot be said of everyone who writes casually about Maslow’s ideas without looking beyond vague recollections of superficial Psych 101 textbooks or their shooting off their foggiest notions of Maslow’s views of management.

If, as you say, the pyramidal presentation of the hierarchy of needs does not accurately represent Maslow’s actual thinking, then you might, as a Maslow scholar, see about correcting the material in the Wikipedia on this subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs This might be the Psych 101 version of Maslow, but it certainly is pervasive.

“Maslow on Management” is an interesting historical document. It is however not just the inscrutable title, “Eupsychian Management Journal,” that needed further thought. It is a honest book, reflecting Maslow’s struggle to come to terms with the phenomenon of 20th Century management. It contains significant insights but lacks the overall coherence that Maslow might have brought to it, if he had had more time.

We can accept that Maslow was a very important historical figure in 20th Century thinking on psychology, without necessarily accepting that he is a completely reliable guide for the 21st Century.

First, thank you very much to Mr. Denning for picking up the discussion I started on my blog in “What Maslow Missed.” I do, however, want to take full responsibility for the misrepresentation of Maslow’s hierarchy relative to his published works that you describe. I was speaking to the common heuristic of Maslow’s work, which, as you note, bears very little resemblance to the depth of thought and understanding of a remarkable thinker and scholar.

I have no doubt but that Maslow himself would be somewhere between astonished and appalled at the way his theories have been simplified, recast, reinterpreted and applied over the years. My personal favorite is the Hierarchy of Hats, but I have seen it altered to frame approaches to everything from interaction design and education to management styles.

It is not surprising that powerful ideas go, in contemporary terms, viral. As we often talk about in social technologies, the content producer doesn’t control the message — and this is true whether it’s a brand or a philosophy, Coke or Maslow.

The functional definition of brands and theories come from the meaning the receivers make of the information they get and the experiences and context surrounding them. This is an additive process, with meaning the product of distinct bits and pieces from different things accumulated over time. There is an increasing amount of interest and attention around the idea of ‘transmedia storytelling’ these days because of our increased awareness of converging and permeable media technology boundaries, but humans have always been transmedia storytellers.

Stories are the brain’s native language, giving us the ability to store the things we ‘know’ in ways that make sense by creating multi-sensory connections through our neural networks. A vast array of theorists from Mead and Vygotsky to Beck and Bandura, support what we all intuitively know: experience changes our understanding of the world, which is saying that what we experience changes the stories we tell to ourselves and others. We get information over time, additively, from multiple sources, what we might now call ‘transmedia’, and process it based on the stories we already hold. As Mr. Denning as so brilliantly shown in his work, stories are fundamental to not just what we do, but who we are as individuals, organizations, and countries. This is a long way of saying that Maslow’s work has become a story, a significant cultural reference for many who have never and will never read his work.

The ability of Maslow’s ideas to by synthesized into a visual representation using the archetypal symbol of a pyramid has also played an important role is their dissemination and adoption because we are contributing our own understanding of symbols and visual and semantic metaphors that amplifies (and possibly distorts) the meaning. We live in a media-rich world where multi-sensory communication is the rule not the exception. It is rare to see an article about Maslow’s theory without a pyramid. The labels and number of levels sometimes vary, but our fundamental and immediate understanding of the pyramid structure is like Maslow on broadband. We get it and immediately look for ways to apply it to our own worldview. If it were not so clear, far fewer people would know of it and employ it, but without that shorthand, more might have actually read his work.

My primary point in “What Maslow Missed,” which Mr. Denning spoke to, is the widespread assumption represented by the pyramid, that human connection is NOT a primary drive and instinct, but one we worry about after we’ve found the cave, slain the wooley mammoth, or paid the heating bill. While this is not something I would attribute to Maslow himself, is it one that can be effectively addressed by tapping a well-known mental model such as the Hierarchy of Needs has become.

People seem to be surprised by the rapidity with which social tools, like Facebook or Pinterest, are adopted and they become preoccupied with and anxious about the tools themselves. In the process, they miss the import of the psychological shifts that come from not just the ability to connect and act effectively on the environment, but in knowing and believing that we can. There are significant implications in this fundamental shift for everything from the obvious, such as marketing and branding, to how we view organizational processes, such as management and education, as Mr. Denning discusses.

I used Maslow’s hierarchy as a convenient point of reference to argue that the drivers of social connection are intimately interwoven into our basic survival, rather than an upward climb from food and shelter. So while it does a disservice to a scholar’s understanding of Maslow, I hope that it provides a glimpse into a new way of thinking about the ways that our core assumptions — our stories of who we are and how we fit into the world — shift with the empowerment of technology and the implications for communicating, engaging, and individual and society-wide expectations.

At the risk of earning the wrath of Maslow scholars, I want to come to defense of Pamela Rutledge and ‘What Maslow Missed’. The kernel of what they are saying seems fundamentally sound and is very important.

Communitarian cultures emphasize that social relationships are one of the things that make us human and distinct from other animals. There is no ‘self-actualization’ that isn’t ‘social-actualization’. ‘Individual motivation’ necessarily reflects one’s responsibilities for and commitments and accountability to others (losing sight of these would make one less-than-human, possibly psychopathic).

The academic mainstream in psychology, economics, and management (still) treats ‘individuals’ as atomistic: self-contained, isolated, and relationship-free. Whoever inspired and influenced him (note his social connections), my take away is that Maslow is fully under the mainstream influence. ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ is, unfortunately, mainly and misguidedly, non-social — relationship free.

It’s possible to acknowledge the great contribution to psychological thinking that Maslow made without having to accept that Maslow said it all or that he was unaffected by the powerful “relationship-free thinking” that has dominated psychology for too long.

Very interesting and intriguing thought, but have 1 question and 1 comment…and would appreciate your thoughts to these…

Question: Where in Maslow’s theory does it make reference to his needs hierarchy as being independent of social interaction? Level 3-5 in my mind specifically reference “Socialization” as a key element in satisfying needs. Similarly, homeless folks whose main focus is feeding themselves (level 1) and finding shelter for the night (level 2) can also be, albeit to a lesser extent, still concerned with social relationships (level 3), how their friends perceive them (level 4), and even the meaning of life (level 5 – original model).

I do agree, like any simple model, Maslow’s theory is not a fully responsive system – it’s a guide which requires some interpretation and thought, given which, it remains extremely useful and applicable for understanding, explaining and handling many human behaviour situations.

Comment: I found your reference to social networking/media etc. very interesting as a substitute for traditional face to face human socialization. My experience and observations to date (specifically North American society) has embraced individualization but seems to have become a “reclused” (for lack of a better term) society. This is very evident with our youth today that can’t hold a basic conversation with another person vs. your reference i.e. Social media/networking as a means of socialization.

This may be a new trend communication in developed modern societies for the most part, but is it truly reinforcing the social glue that binds our societies together to ensure our survival?…I think not. The integrity of our societal “glue” in my mind is slowly but surely disintegrating, moving in a complete opposite direction vs. closer to the basics of social interaction which to your article ensures the satisfaction of our needs hierarchy.

Bottom-line, I am not at all confident that the foundations of our “modern-day society” are very stable and that the true meaning of social interaction and synergy is actually evolving for the better.

Very interesting and intriguing thought, but have 1 question and 1 comment…and would appreciate your thoughts/insights…

Question: Where in Maslow’s theory does it make reference to his needs hierarchy as being independent of social interaction? Level 3-5 in my mind specifically reference “Socialization” as a key element in satisfying needs. Similarly, homeless folks whose main focus is feeding themselves (level 1) and finding shelter for the night (level 2) can also be, albeit to a lesser extent, still concerned with social relationships (level 3), how their friends perceive them (level 4), and even the meaning of life (level 5 – original model).

I do agree, like any simple model, Maslow’s theory is not a fully responsive system – it’s a guide which requires some interpretation and thought, given which, it remains extremely useful and applicable for understanding, explaining and handling many human behaviour situations.

Comment: I found your reference to social networking/media etc. very interesting as a substitute for traditional face to face human socialization. My experience and observations to date (specifically North American society) has embraced individualization but seems to have become a “reclused” (for lack of a better term) society. This is very evident with our youth today that can’t hold a basic conversation with another person vs. your reference i.e. Social media/networking as a means of socialization.

This may be a new trend of communication in developed modern societies for the most part, but is it truly reinforcing the social glue that binds our societies together to ensure our survival?…I think not. The integrity of our societal “glue” in my mind is slowly but surely disintegrating, moving in a complete opposite direction vs. closer to the basics of social interaction which to your article ensures the satisfaction of our needs hierarchy.

Bottom-line, I am not at all confident that the foundations of our “modern-day society” are very stable and that the true meaning of social interaction and synergy is actually evolving for the better.